Page 154 - Costellazioni 5

DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

rative terrain” set out in 1590. Lacking the guidance of the Le er to
Raleigh, readers in 1596 were, Bellamy writes, “abandoned with noth-
ing but memories of the prior installment’s template to guide them
through the ‘dark conceits’ that lead, without warning,” to incomple-
6
tion (my emphasis). For Bellamy, the romance narrative’s misalign-
ment resulted in part from the later books’ failure to achieve the dy-
nastic stability that had been modeled on Orlando Furioso and its con-
cluding marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante (Canto 46). Spenser’s
departure from the unifying national aim of this and other early mod-
ern heroic poems contributed, according to Bellamy, to the “loss of
7
narrative control” that appears in the later books. With many abrupt
shifts that threaten the idea of a story-controlling quest, Book 4 has
difficulty se ling on a central narrative, fli ing from the relationships
of loving friends such as Amoret and Britomart to those of the lovers
Arthegall and Britomart, the quasi-lovers Belphoebe and Timias, or
the friends Cambell and Triamond, to the farcical tilts and pairings at
Satyrane’s tournament, to Scudamour’s disconnected rehearsal of his
adventures in Venus’s temple, to the celebration of the marriage of the
rivers Thames and Medway, and to the concluding promise of mar-
riage, not of Scudamour to Amoret or of Arthegall to Britomart but of
the less central Marinell to Florimell. The narrative fragmentation of
Book 4 signals shifts in Books 5 and 6 that feature by rapid pacing with
abrupt transitions, sour popular responses to the heroic achievements
of the knights Arthegall and Calidore, and a sense of the work’s in-
creasingly ambivalent “voice of incompletion.” 8
The large-scale threats to coherence between the two install-
ments are mirrored in local, episodic disruptions and interruptions
within both editions. Of the first three books, Linda Gregerson ob-

6 Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “The Faerie Queene (1596),” The Oxford Handbook of
Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 271.
7 Ibid., 275.
8 Bellamy, 284-288, cites evidence for this incompletion from the later books’
hanging narrative threads, the author’s mixed-up names of characters, and
mangled details.

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